mad_scotty

jax state has been very lucky, had a series of outstanding jazz instructors going back to the 70's.

dude, seriously, they had consistent intonation problems, particularly in their trumpets, and this coming off a streak of years of really, really good hornlines. it was an off year for them. i don't always agree with the judges, but they pretty much got this corps right with the 5th place spot. that may not fit well on your "i love the cadets" shrine, but its an honest and defensible assessment of their program this year. would you prefer i gripe about narration and try to temper it by saying "but the hornline was great" just so i'll sound a little more even handed?

the madison food was so healthy that after finals i walked into a wendy's, ordered a bacon cheeseburger large fries and large coke out of dimly remembered habit and the shock of so much sugar and grease into my system made me so sick i could barely stand up and walk back to my parents van. luckily, i was drum corps trained, and the second they hit the interstate i passed out, and i was fine when they stopped driving. and i when i say healthy, i don't just mean no sugar, caffeine or fat, we ate really well (so well i actually started to gain weight at one point on tour). the food was plentiful, and you could eat as much as you wanted 4 times a day, but it was a pure health food diet, except for all the pb+j's laying around for anyone who didn't like what the cook crew had prepared.

you thought the cadets had the best corps? this was the weakest hornline they have had in years, maybe going back to 91 even.

then come up with another word that suits your world view. for most people, the body is still growing during that period. if you don't have proper nutrition while your body is growing, it stunts your growth, and can have other long term consequences. ask your pediatrician about that one.

i didn't think you were recommending feeding people actual cardboard but drum corps have a responsibility to not just feed their kids but feed them well, and that means getting everyone balanced nutrition, including fresh vegetables and lean protein. anything else is actually physically harmful to the human body, which is bad at any time, but has particularly long lasting consequences when its done during formative years. you don't get a second chance to develop healthy internal organs and strong bones.

Why isn't there a video game where you can hook up a snare pad, or a wind machine with a mouthpiece slot and 3 valve keys, and jam along with some hot drum corps shows? Would this not be the most bad-a## game ever?

27th Lancers: Anaheim Kingsmen:wish i'd heard enough of them to have an opinion! Blue Devils:tie-- 80 and 91 Blue Knights: i hate to say this, but i can't remember any of their shows off the top of my head Blue Stars: same as above Bluecoats: 88, autumn leaves, big snareline, big sop line, the ultimate bloo Boston Crusaders: my favorite is one i've never seen but always wanted to: old school boston in a corps fight, whipping the cadets in the parking lot Bridgemen: how to pick between 77 and 81? land of make believe or in the stone and my all time fave west side story? Cadets: 87. hands down 87. best baris i've ever heard after the 75 and 84 scouts Carolina Crown: 07 Cavaliers: either 87 or 93, i'm partial to korean folk song and 93 was surprisingly musical and well played, a rarity for the cavaliers who tend to be one or the other, rarely both Crossmen: 92 Glassmen: 95, that sweet little bach show, i watched it with their staff in jacksonville that year and had a total fan moment with them Madison Scouts: 95, 92, 75, any of the early 80's, i lub me some madison Phantom Regiment: 93, 96, and 03 in a tie Santa Clara Vanguard: 87, easily Spirit: 86, a quintessential spirit show and one of the most underrated hornlines ever Star of Indiana: 93 Suncoast Sound: 85, of course. every time someone says 85 suncoast and talks about the lick i think they mean the sops in the closer ;) Troopers: ummmm....90, because i love john barry, but honestly their hornline never quite gets me there, even in 90

thats actually not true. poor nutrition during formative years stunts your growth and leads to health problems later in life, and for most people that period of growth continues until they are 18-21, on average.

actually nekkid run through is another old madison tradition, right up there with naked disco bus ride when passing another corps on the interstate

not when i marched, but then again, its been 15 years, plenty of time to invent a new tradition or two. now, we did have a tradition of playing contra wars, where we would compete with other contra lines to set up the furthest back from the rest of the corps at retreat. the blue devils were our arch enemies, and both of our lines got seriously chewed out for edging a little too far back at a couple of points. the most memorable contra war to me was a night we played in a small stadium with no backside stands, just homeside with a fence at the back. we kept edging back, edging back, and the pesky blue devils contras, thinking they had timed it perfectly made one final move and ended up with their butts resting right on the fence. they all started smirking at us and our section leader, a freakishly strong guy named steve glenn got to attention, about faced towards the fence, grabbed his contra by the butt and held it out, perfectly parallel to the ground, with his arms fully extended for a good thirty seconds. he brought the horn in and got back into an attention posture. a couple of bd guys tried it, and then they were just like ok guys, you win. good times

96 for me, and its not even really close

good point. people don't talk about them much but the 86 blue devils were maybe the single most dominating corps ever, undefeated wire to wire and swept the captions, and i've talked to a couple of guys on that line that said in 86 spirit was the one corps that worried them, the hornline was just that good. and the 88 spirit show is one of the most underrated all time, an absolutely brilliant hornline, musically the spiritual forerunner of the 93 star show in many ways, they were hammered by judges who openly told them that they were dropping the scores because "spirit should stick to dixie instead of playing petrouchka."

with all respect to crown, bluecoats, and the muchachos, and 27, the best corps never to win a title is the bridgemen. between 77 and 81 they consistently had outstanding hornlines, some of dci's all time best soloists, a creative and original approach to presentation, originated some of the all time classic drum corps hits that went into the standard band repertoire like land of make believe, spanish dreams and in the stone, performed arguably the best musical interpretation of west side story ever, won three straight percussion titles, and were generally just outstanding. like VK they were never judged fairly by judges who thought their irreverent style and showmanship were out of place in such a "serious" activity. i've always wondered how high they would have topped out had they been judged fairly, and not been disqualified in 77 (they were scored in 4th that year, i believe).

John Phillip Sousa, on Theodore Thomas, America's first great symphony conductor: "He gave Wagner, Liszt and Tchaikowsky, in the belief that he was educating his public; I gave Wagner, Liszt and Tchaikowsky with the hope that I was entertaining my public." The rest of the article I got this quote from is available on The Wall Street Journal's Online Edition here: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1218831117...us_inside_today

my college tuba sections instruments, laid out in a "manifold" 20j.marchingsoutherners.org/home.htm we carried them with drum straps. but in our defense, go to the media section and listen to "quilting party": http://www.marchingsoutherners.org/

where in your mixed up crazy world did you see me asserting that judges scores were accurate or deserved? seriously, unless your tone deaf, go and listen to the recordings of 92 finals, the cavies were a bottom tier hornline. easily the worst hornline ever to win a championship, and clearly not in the class of star, bd, phantom, scv, madison or the cadets that year.ironically enough the next year they had a pretty decent hornline, particularly the contras, their best until their current run of excellent brass started in the late 90's. but 92 was just a poor hornline all around, no way around it.

this isn't your high school band doing a spring concert in front of a captive audience of students and obligatory parents, where the goal is for the performers to show the growth they have achieved through the course of the year. dci is a paid professional performance in front of a public audience whose relationship with the performers is roughly equivalent in most cases to the relationships pro sports fans have with their teams. internalized emotional intensity would be fine if someone was playing in a bubble, but drum corps don't do that. your desire to remove the fans from the equation is shared by dci, but this has been a disastrous policy. less fans=less money, and thats no good for the activity as a whole. and that isn't me making up numbers to support what i think, thats me reading the actual numbers of less corps playing at less corps in front of less fans and drawing the only possible conclusion, that this is bad for the activity. oh, you might want to test your theory about emotional intensity having value outside of its ability to communicate to an audience (why let a musical principal as fundamental as communication between performer and audience spoil your fun, after all?)---go out to a street corner, any street corner, and be completely disengaged but "emotionally intense" for a couple of hours and see how many girls stop to talk to you.

if you reread the criteria you posted emotion is listed twice, and so would have more weight. it also lists things like tension and release and expressiveness, which are essentially subcaptions of emotion. basically, emotional impact and things that are direct quotients of it are roughly half of the individual descriptors. going back to the original argument, the article on dci today basically describes ge as the corps ability to sell itself, which rationally, taken with the individual descriptors should mean its ability to sell itself emotionally to an audience combined with its abilities in specific techniques related to this emotional capture. as for phantom 93 you have a valid point that they wouldn't be an 8-12, but you cherry picked the top placed corps i mentioned there. most of them were 4th-6th place corps, a 3rd place corps who has the best audience sale, with that being half the equation from my reading, would have been in 6th place in the other, more technical half to average to 3rd.

you've obviously never listened to the 92 finals audio recordings. that was maybe the 7th or 8th best hornline out there, they were so bad that they were a running joke amongst brass players in drum corps for years after. when i said top 3 i should have been more clear, as in legitimately one of the three best hornlines out there. now, 92 was a really great year for hornlines, admittedly, but the cavaliers weren't one of the good ones, they played a high school level book and didn't play it well in the same year that the blue devils, star, phantom, scv, madison and cadets all rolled out really great musical performances.

i know 3 pages of posts can be a lot for some people, but someone already raised this issue and i already replied.

I'm just bothered that a dci mouthpiece is claiming that dci judges follow the rulebook when its very obvious that they haven't done so in over 15 years. it's insulting to me as a fan to be talked to as if i'm completely incapable of seeing this obvious truth. and for dci to continue to refuse to amend the judging criteria to reflect the way shows are actually scored, or to retrain the ge judges to score shows "by the book" is a cop out to me. in a larger sense this bothers me because the 4 ge judges basically select the champion every year, and the majority of corps follow the judges directives slavishly. this kills creativity and diversity, and since the fans have been effectively removed from the equation it erodes the activities financial viability. do i have a solvent? sure, judge ge according to the criteria, and give corps an incentive to be entertaining and musical (the original justification for moving from a tick system to a ge heavy system). but if the board of directors refuses to enforce that sort of judging, they should at least show enough integrity to have the judging criteria realistically reflect what the judges actually do. i know they loathe the fans and don't want to be responsible to anyone but themselves, but come on, we're real people out here, with real eyes and ears, and we now when we're being lied to. and the current explanation of scoring criteria is just that, a lie.

i don't think anyone has ever accused drum corps or the dci board of being competent marketers, and it makes perfect sense they would willfully block anything that creates a good pr buzz for them online. and they may have a lot of reasons for doing so, at least they may be convincing themselves they do, but cya is not one of them, copywrite holders sue the poster and the hosting company, not the individual whose performance has been posted (and not, i've found, anyone who posts or hosts a link to a performance, dcp's policy here is based on supporting dci, not liability)

i learned many lessons in drum corps i use in running a business today. how to put in real work. how to maintain focus all day instead of for a little bit here and there. how to put my best foot forward when it counts. how key preparation is to developing consistent results. how to seperate the world into the things i can control and the things i can't, and not to worry about anything but what i can actual have an effect on. how to break a problem into its component parts and deal with them separately. how to anticipate trouble and have a plan before things go wrong so i don't panic under pressure. you know, i don't really get a chance to interview drum corps vets in my neck of the woods, but i'd look at it as a pretty serious resume builder.

basically what i got from your post is "just because you say its so doesn't make it so, but i'll feel free to pop off some randome anecdote and disprove your random anecdote". why don't you and perry s try counting instead of fulminating. go on corpsreps, look at the lists of shows during the season back in the 70's, 80's, 90's and today. you'll notice something. there are less shows today than there ever have been. you may be seeing more articles, and perry s might have just as many people in his reserved section at murfreesboro, but less shows=less tickets=less fans. thats not true becasue i say its so, its true because in the end the numbers just don't lie. this activity went down an artistic path starting in the mid 90's and culminating in this decade that has coincided with less members marching in less corps at less shows in front of less fans. fact, not opinion. having said that, i don't think the situation is a complete loss. broadway went through a similar period in the 70's and early 80's. theater got more and more experimental, and less and less relevant. there were lots of intellectual successes but very few hits. people started asking if theater was dead, and then phantom and les mis came in and cured it all. theater was suddenly relevant again, because the fans all came back. all they needed was a few hits, and thats all drum corps needs, a few hits. well, that and the will to put the hit shows out in front, and relegate the intellectual exploration back to the fringes it once occupied. fans want something that appeals to their hearts, not their minds, and as long as phantom and crown and a few others can give them what they want this activity has a chance to recover. but lets face it, the show the cavaliers and blue devils have been co-authoring for the last ten years just isn't a very big draw. and fans in seats are what will save this activity, nothing else.